A Gift From Coty

August 11, 2001 – June 4, 2008

In a temporary moment of insanity, after we lost our first Dal (reserved, sweet, obedient, lovable Pongo), we adopted from the Internet a liver Dalmatian named Coty who was totally wild.  Day one he started playfully lunging at our throats to kiss us and tried to jump out the window at the vet's office... shaking and whimpering the whole time.  He was extremely hyperactive and totally unpredictable.  Even after spending three months trying to train him we were nowhere.

We contacted an animal communicator to get some insight on why the blank slate.  The first one told us to put him down.  She said his brain was not functioning properly and he could become dangerous given the lunging.  She could not communicate with him because his attention span was barely a second and he could never focus long enough to be trained.

We then found an animal communicator on the Internet who confirmed the 1-second attention span but recommended a kinesiologist in Colorado who had good results working remotely.  Being desperate, we made the call. 

Long story short, after only one session, the very next day Coty sat quietly and waited for his food without the usual fuss we had come to know as normal.  It seemed miraculous!  She said his brain was not wired properly due to the fact that he spent his life in a crate and tied to a tree.  He never ran and played like other dogs so his neural pathways never developed. 

She told us that Coty was doing extremely well considering he had no ability to focus.  All environmental stimuli hit him with equal intensity, which was why the 1-second attention span.  She equated it to one of those commercials where pictures flash every second.  He couldn’t connect the dots.  She gave us exercises for him and said that it would take 2 weeks for the neural pathways she gave him to develop properly.  The more he used them the stronger they would become.

Two weeks later we hired a local animal communicator who told us that he had about a 3-second attention span.  That 200% improvement was all we needed to hear.  Nine months, four sessions and a considerable amount of training later, Coty had improved to the point where he was acting like a normal hyper dog… one with a great deal of intelligence and intuition.  It took only one day to train him to do almost anything and no time at all for him to figure out how to use his new tricks to gain the attention and affection of everyone he met.

The first thing we trained him to do was use his dog door to access our 4-acre property… where he promptly dug up huge pieces of our drip irrigation system.  Everyday when we came home from work, there would be another long black graceful arch sticking up out of the ground.  Or he might be running around with a 6-foot piece of it in his mouth, sometimes throwing it up in the air and pouncing when it landed.  He lived to run.

He chewed a brand new lounge chair, the new sky chair, the leg off a stool, his basket, pretty much anything that caught his eye had to be christened.  But on the bright side, he only did these things when he was home alone.  When we were home, he was right there with us.  On command he would sit, stay, lay down, rollover, jump, shake hands, beg, come, find something, open doors, even dance, sometimes performing spontaneously to get attention… and he was an excellent guard dog.

He never lost his energy.  Coty would literally burst into a room like Kramer on Seinfeld.  He would tear through the house looking for you (which sounded like a heard of horses on our hardwood floors) then bust open the door so hard that it would slam into the wall, but as soon as he saw you he would freeze as he slid across the floor.  He would then anxiously wait for you to notice him.  If ignored he would quietly go lay down near you and just chill.

One year and $1200 later, Coty had succeeded in wiggling his way into our home and hearts.  So we had our local animal communicator assess the situation again.  He kept saying he loved us so much but, living only in the moment, he didn’t want to revisit the past or his previous abuse other than to say that every place he had been was better then the one before and he really appreciated everything we had done for him.  

I asked if he was happy hear and he showed her a picture of him “running through a field with no holds barred.”   Given Coty’s penchant for running, I took that to mean yes and put it in the running record I kept for him... never guessing the huge significance that phrase would later have. 

Six more eventful years went by quickly.  There was never a dull moment with Coty.  One day we came back from a 10-day vacation and he was acting like a normal dog, which was slow for him so we took him to the vet.  

They saw a normal dog, said he was just getting old, took some blood at our insistence, and said they would call in a week.  When he walked into a glass door on the way out, we decided to take him to another vet in the morning.  Morning came sooner than we thought.

At 3:00 am we took him to the other vet.  He could barely walk and was totally blind.  He was in renal failure and his organs were shutting down.  We stayed with him for several hours and took turns lying on the floor, arms around him, keeping him warm in the empty waiting room while we waited for test results.  At 7:00 am they said the prognosis was not good and they should keep him there while they tried some things.

When we went back at 4:00 there was no hope.  Coty lay there motionless and could barely open his eyes.  We held him, kissed him, and gave him all the love we had when we said goodbye and helped him move on.

A month later, we were still having difficulty dealing with the loss.  A new acquaintance was a spirit communicator so, on the spur of the moment, I asked her to contact him.  The minute she did, it took her breath away.  She said it was like a whirlwind all around us.  She, not knowing anything about Coty, said that he must have been extremely high-energy.  (She got that right.)

I asked if he was in pain when he died but he didn’t want to revisit the past.  It was a distant memory and so far in the past that it was irrelevant.  He had moved on but he appreciated us being there for him and letting him go.  It made it easier.  (I so needed to hear that.)

At the end of the session, I asked if he was happy now.  She said she saw him “running through a field with no holds barred.”

The recollection of those same words 6 years ago came looming back into my mind as I tearfully tried to control the lump in my throat so I could thank her for the great gift of knowing that all was well and that we did the right thing by helping him cross over.

If you have had a similar guilt-ridden experience after helping a cherished pet leave this realm, I hope this remarkable gift from our boy Coty soothes your soul as it did mine.  

In loving memory,

Marie McCaffrey

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